It is desirable to provide a network of multiple aerial vehicles and ground stations through which an aerial vehicle will be able to receive data services through a radio link either directly from that aircraft to a ground station or via links to other aircraft from which a connection will be made to a ground station. Maintaining communication links is a complicated task with present systems providing poor connectivity or no connectivity to users on an airborne or moving vehicle.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,072,977, assigned to Codem Systems Inc, discloses a High bandwidth network access is extended to vehicles and passengers on vehicles. The network is extended to a vehicle by way of one or more intermediate nodes, which may be other vehicles or signal relays. In order to acquire the vehicles to which to extend the network, route data is provided to the intermediate nodes and to the vehicles. Computers on-board the vehicles and intermediate nodes determine which pairs of vehicles and intermediate nodes should establish links to form a network based on the route data and link scoring. The vehicles and intermediate nodes then control directional antennas to point at each other based on the route data and the scoring to establish the links. However a problem with the Codem system is that it does not effectively or dynamically manage datalinks on a target aircraft when moving through a particular region. The Codem system describes routing calculation steps to figure out all possible link LOS then add link quality sorting before directing antenna pointing, but the link quality sorting does not address the bandwidth being demanded. Moreover the problem is compounded by moving aircraft where the bandwidth requirement can fluctuate greatly during a flight time.
It is an object to provide an improved system and method for enabling and maintaining communication links with one or more airborne vehicles.